


Trapped in a Lie

by Angst_Distribution_Service (Mister_Fox)



Series: Fox's Horrorween Entries [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Horror, Imprisonment, Solitary Confinement, Soul King!Kisuke, Unable To Move, death ideation, the horror of being trapped without even the option of death as a way to escape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27299392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mister_Fox/pseuds/Angst_Distribution_Service
Summary: The soul king needed replacing. How fortunate it is that a candidate just made himself extremely available.
Series: Fox's Horrorween Entries [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993159
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Trapped in a Lie

He can’t move.

He can tense his muscles, and he can strain, he can try. There is nothing wrong with his body, or the gigai.

He tries to move them, one by one, with breaks as his thoughts are torn away from him, drowned in the information being poured into him, through him, his brain just the central processor in a giant machine that does nothing but propagates misery. Toes are stuck, he finds, as stuck as they were the last time he tried this. He wriggles them one by one, but to no avail.

His thoughts are taken from him, for a moment, all processing diverted to deal with a sudden influx of souls. A purified Menos? Adjuchas? A handful of them get a good lot, a happy lot, decades to spend in comfort. Less random than it was before, maybe, as he does his best to put those who had harsher lives, who knew mostly misery into happier places. Most get mediocrity to worse to hell, as there are too many souls in the central rings to fit any more - and pure chaos in the outer ones.

But is it worse to suffer a little and then die, get to pass out, strangled or murdered or cut with a blade? Or to suffer a mediocrity that will drag on for decades if not centuries?

That’s that set sorted. He can eke out a little break, hide a little bit of his brain and keep it to himself, just to be a person for a moment again.

A person. That almost feels like a joke, now.

Knees, legs, still immobile, aching in his pose.

Another influx, larger. Arrancar? Not Vasto Lorde, not enough. Perhaps a disaster in the living world. Still, so many souls to sort. More than actually die in real-time - so many souls get lost in transit, being sucked into the sorting mechanism centuries later or earlier than they ever existed.

All that those people are, their lives, their essences, pass through his mind. For mere moments, he holds them; he is them. And then he has to move them, sort them, rebalance the numbers of souls coming in and out, keeping some back because there’s not enough space, not right now, not enough death and murder and massacre to make souls finally reach the reincarnation cycle.

Another break as the mechanism is forced to wait until there is new space, free space.

Hips, torso, neck - none of them are any use.

If only he could break the mechanism, stop dragging the souls from the reincarnation cycle and into this hellscape. This world created by those too afraid of death and being forgotten to pass on, those too in love with power to stop lording it over others. If only he could grasp it and tear it apart, piece by piece. But he has no access to it. It just has access to him.

Fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders.

It almost feels like he can move his index finger on his left hand, a little more, wiggle it up and down. But he’s not sure. It could just be the same as it was, the same one tiny flaw in this trap.

Overall conclusion: he’s still, frozen inside the block of crystal. No change from the last check-up, unknown time ago. Precisely the same as it was decades? Centuries? Hours? ago, with no way to know the passage of time.

The crystal moulded to his body is as perfect as ever. No reason it shouldn’t be. Nothing has touched. Nothing is permitted to touch it, guarded as it is by figures that are near legend.

Other might say that it is guarded by _monsters_.

How fitting. Logical, even. The world created for monsters, guarded by monsters.

After all, only monsters would want to keep it all going, once they know the whole truth.

Funny thing, the shallow truth. He thought he knew it, once.

But he hadn’t.

Not until a jagged metal crown was forced upon his head, and he was tossed in liquid stone that swallowed him with an insatiable hunger.

If he had, he would have run, run so far, so fast. He would have run forever.

He sinks into the numbers, the souls, for a while. What he is doing is awful, even if he can’t help it, even if he is just the interface, the processor, where the machine borrows his thoughts to carry out the intent written into it.

All he can see is suffering.

But for a moment, there, he doesn’t feel it. Doesn’t feel the way he is nothing more than a fly in amber, forever cast in a thrashing pose, lungs full of the crystal as he was forced down so deep under the crushing weight of the liquid that he could not hope to swim up. Doesn’t have to see nothing but darkness in the closed room that houses him, his eyes frozen forever open.

If this gigai weren’t constructed so that the user would never need to breathe, would never be noticed in the dark because of the sound of breathing, or the subtle movements from inhales and exhales, he would have been given the mercy of drowning, rather than being suspended in this trap.

Akin to the people in the trap that is the outside. Most of the souls there have no powers - they can not starve or thirst or lose sleep to the point of death. If they find freedom, it is only at the end of a blade.

If this gigai wasn’t constructed to recycle the energy spend on thinking, on the heart beating, to make the user’s presence unable to be felt by others as all reiatsu was caught and recycles and fed back to the soul, then he could have starved to death after enough years, even his captain-clas reserves slowly, inevitably drained out through the simple necessities.

Like the gifted children in the outer districts, among whom he once numbered. They suffer hunger until they are free of the hell, through becoming shinigami or dying. Others starve to death too, of course. Former street rat shinigami sent on missions where being trapped or lost and starved is a risk. Those spiritually-strong people that are caught and raised by nobles that want their own private, loyal armies, driven by the promise of a scrap of food at the end of the day.

If he could move his hands just enough to cast small kidou, perhaps he could expend all his reiatsu. Enough that his heart would have no energy to keep beating.

Enough to free himself. Maybe free everyone else, if it takes too long to replace him.

He was a lucky break, after all.

If they hadn’t been watching, if they hadn’t seen him invent such a perfect prison for himself, they wouldn’t have been able to replace his predecessor as easily.

It’s not power that they needed, never power, to support the valley of screams that the call Soul Society, the afterlife, the heaven.

Just processing capacity to keep it all stable.

He knows that now. He didn’t know it, not quite, not enough, before. Or he would have sided with _him_ , no matter how much he hated him. No matter how much his friends had suffered from him.

And now he is forced to perpetuate this very hell until the end of time.

And the only one who could have freed him, well.

He doubts that, after ten thousand years in prison, even that burning ambition will still be alive.

But it is his own fault that what could have been his salvation will never come now. He helped build that prison - and now that prison keeps his going.

There is no blade left that will dare to rise against the Soul King.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!  
> Poor Kisuke, the isolation and confinement and agony of being used like that are doing a real number on his outlook on life.
> 
> (Yoruichi will come and bust him out one day. He's not gonna stay trapped there forever, even though it will feel like it.)


End file.
